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Big Data requires big thought
Explosive data growth is a reality and its trajectory is rising quickly. In order to accommodate and support this level of intensification, more robust and powerful data management solutions are becoming increasingly
important.By Gilda Foss, Co-chair of SNIA’s Analytics and Big Data Committee, NetApp.
D
ata generation and the diversification of data use drive the adoption of more role-based storage solutions within the data center. These factors, coupled with the transition to highly virtualized data center environments, affects how organizations buy and manage server, storage, and network assets and are key drivers in what is propelling Big Data into an everyday reality. The outlook is Big Data in the Cloud.
Big Data is comprised of datasets that grow so large that they become cumbersome to manipulate using traditional database management tools. Difficulties include capture, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and visualization. The growth trend continues because of the significant benefits of working with larger and larger datasets that allow analysts to discover business trends and solve problems. Though a moving target, current limits are on the order of terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes of data. At this trajectory, even zettabytes (1,000s of exabytes) will be a reality in the not-too-distant future.
Data is everywhere, whether created by users, applications, or machines and it’s growing exponentially with no vertical market or industry being spared. Due to this reality, IT organizations everywhere are forced to come to grips with storing, managing and extracting value from every piece of it as inexpensively as possible. This begins the real race to cloud computing where the framework needs the ability to process data increasingly in real-time and in far-greater orders of magnitude at a fraction of what it would typically cost.
A New Era of Big Scale Twenty years ago, IT teams were focussed on obtaining optimal performance from the key applications and infrastructure of their enterprises. These silos acting as “systems of record”, typically did a relatively good job of keeping track of vital information, but they were very expensive, difficult to manage and did not offer sufficient
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‘drill-down’ insight into the data to drive business advantage. Ten years ago, the IT focus shifted to efficiency, or ‘how to do more with less’. Technologies like virtualization, sharing, and consolidation of the enterprise’s existing infrastructure became the key drivers for IT teams.
Presently, we are entering a new era of big scale, where the amount of data processed and stored by enterprises is breaking down every architectural construct in the storage industry today. As a result, IT teams are trying to convert these existing systems of record, designed and built back in the 1990s and 2000s, into “systems of engagement”, which are defined as systems that can efficiently deliver the necessary information, to the right people, in real time, to help them perform more sophisticated analyses and make better business decisions.
Furthermore, this massive increase in scale is occurring for a number of reasons. Due of cost pressures, many companies are consolidating their physical data centers, as they can no longer afford for each business unit to have its own IT infrastructure distributed around the globe. The move to cloud computing also contributes to increased scale, aggregating the demand of hundreds of thousands of users onto fewer, centralized systems.
Another source of the increase in scale is the massive growth in machine-generated and user-generated data. Digital storage technologies are moving to denser media, digital photography is ubiquitous, videos are using higher resolution, and advanced analytics require far more data, and hence more and denser storage. Machine-generated data from sensor networks, buyer behavior tracking, and countless other sources contribute to much larger datasets that must be understood and commercialized. In short, the amount of data is increasing and the data objects themselves are getting bigger. All of these forces together put an enormous amount
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